Capsized Alchemy: Works by Liz Miller
Capsized Alchemy brings together recent wall-based fiber works and a new site-specific sculptural installation to create a dynamic environment that invites viewers to reimagine their relationship to everyday objects. Found, thrifted, reclaimed, and recycled materials become armatures for improvised weaving and textile-based adornment. Ubiquitous white closet shelving, bed headboards, and other obsolete items from daily life serve as backdrops for dynamic interludes of woven color and pattern that simultaneously highlight and negate their banality, allowing them to take on new potential—while never completely camouflaging their utilitarian origins. The works presented are thereby equal parts fact and fantasy, their materiality rooted in a limited functional reality yet yielding to whimsy, improvisation, and possibility. Reclaiming these objects and giving them new lives becomes an act of care and love through which the ordinary is transformed into the extraordinary.
The installation environment unfolds as a deluge of objects flooding into the gallery—the entrails of contemporary culture condensed into a singular gesture, a giant brushstroke wrought upon the space. The slow weaving of the components counters the chaos of the sculptural arrangement, encouraging viewers to find order within restless tumult. Just as the artist’s process of weaving cord through objects slows the pace of creation, the attention granted to these materials asks viewers to slow down as well, finding their own realities reflected in everyday objects where, through the vehicle of abstraction, magic and possibility are revealed.
Biography
Liz Miller’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad. Her awards include a McKnight Foundation Fellowship for Fiber Artists, a McKnight Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, and numerous grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board. Miller has completed artist residencies at Mass MoCA (North Adams, MA), Stove Works (Chattanooga, TN), the Joan Mitchell Center (New Orleans, LA), and the McColl Center for Art + Innovation (Charlotte, NC), among others, and will be in residence at Loghaven Artist Residency (Knoxville, TN) during Fall 2026. Miller is Professor of Installation Art and Drawing at Minnesota State University-Mankato. She lives and works in Good Thunder, MN.
